New Movie Shorts

ALONE IN THE DARK
(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

Not so fast, monster.
Before you eat Tara Reid
You should boil her first.

(AMC Orleans; Roxy; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)

THE CHORUS

Given its setting in a parochial French boarding school just after World War II, The Chorus inevitably brings to mind Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants, although Christophe Barratier’s treacly tale is light-years away from Malle’s quiet condemnation. Like the vague Bon Voyage, Barratier’s film (which Miramax briefly translated as "The Choir" before apparently deciding that might sound too, well, European) treats the era as a historical playground without so much as a whiff of the country’s national trauma and shame. The film may overtly concern a washed-up composer (Gérard Jugnot) who whips a group of delinquents into shape through the power of four-part harmony, but it’s hard to ignore the way a curved motto painted on the wall resembles the gates of Auschwitz; here it’s "Labor opprobus omni vincit" rather than "Arbeit macht frei." The movie’s moral idiocy trumps any feel-good sentiment, although the film’s box-office success in its home country indicates that the French love being lied to as much as Americans do. --Sam Adams (Ritz Five)

HIDE AND SEEK

"Some things," says dead-meat mom Amy Irving at the beginning of John Polson’s wannabe-scary January release, "are beyond therapy." She’s talking to her grumpy psychologist husband (Robert De Niro, who should stick to American Express commercials), but the diagnosis applies to the film more broadly. Mom’s demise leaves their pale and waiflike daughter Emily (Dakota Fanning, alternately channeling Beetlejuice-era Winona Ryder and Christina Ricci’s Wednesday Addams) in dad’s hands. Against the obviously wise advice of Emily’s therapist (Famke Janssen), he hauls her off to a big old isolated country house where it rains a lot, and the neighbors, Melissa Leo and Robert John Burke, are oddly needy and a little creepy. Still, they’re not as odd and creepy as dad, who takes Emily fishing and calls it "play." The nosy sheriff (Dylan Baker) and a pretty divorcee (Elisabeth Shue) stop by, a pet is murdered, things go bump, Emily blames her new imaginary friend (about whom she cannot speak; see also: M. Night Shyamalan movies) and the bad-dad business escalates. While the studio is trying like heck to maintain secrecy about the "final reel," it hardly seems worth the trouble, as this derivative film holds no surprises. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

A LOVE SONG FOR BOBBY LONG

Lovely and deep-seeming at the same time, Scarlett Johansson has quickly become one of those rare performers who can do no wrong; she even looked decent in The Perfect Score. In Shainee Gabel’s first feature, she’s good again, even though her role, situation and supporting players are less than imaginative. Based on Ronald Everett Capps’ novel, the film observes the collision of three misfits: angry, alcoholic academic John Travolta; ex-grad assistant/aspiring novelist Gabriel Macht; and long-abandoned daughter Johansson, whose mother -- a singer named Lorraine -- has died and left the trio her rural New Orleans house. They argue, bond, share secrets and learn about love and responsibility. Travolta plays his part large -- all big accent, big gut, and big fat gloomy history, with some allusion to a big heart as well. The young ’uns upstage him by underplaying (though that’s not hard to do) and encourage contemplation of how good they can and will be with more nuanced, less cliche material. --C.F. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)